Philosophical reflections on perfume and perfumery:
An exploration of aesthetic, epistemological, metaphysical, moral, ontological, and phenomenological issues.
Relevant comments are most welcome—whether you agree or disagree!

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Perfume
reception is the consummate expression of subjectivity. This is how
and why two different perfume enthusiasts can disagree vehemently
about the value of the very same perfume. Chandler Burr hails as
masterpieces Diptyque Eau
de Lierre and Dolce &
Gabbana Light Blue.
Turin & Sanchez deride both of those perfumes as one-star
failures. If the value of a perfume were a matter of objective fact,
then one of two critics who held diametrically opposed views would
have to be wrong.

So
is Light Blue
a triumph of modern perfumery? Or is it a hopeless wreck, less a
perfume than it is swill or dreck? Perhaps it all comes down to
idiosyncratic tastes. Burr likes clean scents, which Turin &
Sanchez appear generally to abhor. Burr appreciates streamlined
scents, while Turin & Sanchez are easily bored. Burr likes amber
and hails Prada Amber
as a masterpiece. Turin & Sanchez dislike amber in general and,
logically enough, Prada Amber
more
specifically. A
chacun son goût.
One
person's masterpiece is another person's disaster. End of story.

Or
perhaps the critics who disagree in their most basic evaluations
really disagree because they actually smell different things, owing
to the natural range of variations in scent sensitivity within a
human population for all of the components of the complex mixtures known as perfumes.
Perhaps those who despise some perfumes fail to detect their beauty
because they do not smell everything that is there. Another
possibility is that they smell more than most other people do. They
may smell substances the presence of which would ruin another
person's experience of the perfume, if only he were capable of
detecting them. A
chacun son nez.

If this way of understanding
aesthetic disagreement about perfumes is true, then in seeking out
the opinions of critics, we would do well to hew to those who seem to
share our basic sensitivities. Otherwise, we'll be led astray by the
advice of people different enough from us to make it the case that we
actually smell different objects when we smell perfume even drawn
from the very same bottle.

Given
the considerable evidence of heterogeneity in human scent perception,
the effort to point outward, attempting to taxonomize perfumes as
stable things in the world alongside other stable things—whether
various types of paintings or the products of less-exalted crafts
such as cooking or winemaking—would seem ultimately to be an otiose
endeavor. To do such a thing is to walk down a path to a dead-end,
because the primary value of perfume—beyond its simple inducement
in us of pleasure—is not artistic but philosophical. The
aforementioned critics want to uphold the objective reality of
perfumic masterpieces. But they cannot even agree amongst themselves
about what the pillars of perfumery are supposed to be.

The
best—and most charitable—way of understanding profound
disagreements about perfume among self-proclaimed experts is simply
to accept the intrinsically subjective nature of perfume perception:
A chacun son goût
et son nez! This
vindicates the critics—they are neither incompetent nor
anosmic—while however simultaneously implying that no one is really
a better expert than anyone else when it comes to perfume, a
conclusion which will likely make the self-styled experts bristle. If
their opinions are no more worthy than anyone else's, then why should
anyone listen to what they have to say? For what, precisely, are
professional perfume critics being paid?

I
think that the answer is clear: they are promoting some perfumes
which will be bought because many ignorant people will simply accept
the self-appointed experts' advice as authoritative. They end by
serving as marketing shills when they hail certain perfumes, holding
them up as objective masterpieces, and effectively advise their
readers to avoid those which they either omit from mention or
vociferously decry. The “experts” become marketing tools—whether
wittingly or not—because perfume, being essentially and
inextricably enmeshed in an economic context, is consumable and
commodified. People pay to wear perfumes, and they choose to buy some
but not others on the basis of the so-called experts' advice. Or am I
giving the critics too much credit? How many of the millions of
perfume consumers out there even know their names?

Probably
not that many, I'd surmise. But another bottle sold is still another
bottle sold, so marketers will support those who support the products
which they are trying to sell. This explains how and why mutually
beneficial arrangements such as The Art of Scent Exhibit at the
Museum of Arts and Design can arise under the guise of objective art
appreciation when in fact the works being exalted are already
best-selling perfumes.

What
do perfume marketers do?

Christian Dior does not use screen captures of Charlize Theron from the film Monster (2003) to advertise their best-selling perfume J'Adore.

Instead, they seduce consumers into believing that they, too, will be bathed in a golden light of glamour, if only they buy and wear the perfume. J'Adore has been reformulated, but the advertisements remain more or less the same and are apparently just as effective as—if not more than—they were at the perfume's launch.

It
probably does not matter much anymore what's inside the bottle. So
long as it is at least wearable, women will continue to buy the
perfume, seduced by the vain hope that they, too, can be as glamorous
as Charlize Theron. But the properties of the perfume are completely
distinct from the images used to market the perfume. This point is graphically illustrated when the same model advertises a variety of
different perfumes.

Given
the highly subjective basis for perfume appreciation, slapping new
and foreign but apparently approbative labels on familiar perfumes,
exalting them as masterworks of this or that movement in art, would
seem to be just another variation on the marketer's game. In
advertisements for perfumes, we are told, in effect, that we will be
beautiful and glamorous or sexy and alluring, if only we don the
product which the advertisement is attempting to persuade us to buy.
There is no logical connection between the models who pose in perfume
advertisements holding bottles and the liquid inside. All of this is
no more and no less than a game of sleight of hand.

Similarly,
the application to perfumes of labels borrowed from the visual arts
such as Neo-romanticism
and Surrealism
is essentially equivalent to what marketers have always done. In
other words, one way of understanding the current exhibit at the
Museum of Arts and Design is as an innovative and ingenious marketing
scheme. Perfumistas may wish to believe otherwise, but perfumery is a
business, and anyone who has even the faintest grasp of the nature of
the enterprise of enterprise should be well aware that the managers
who agreed to invest money in the Art of Scent exhibit were concerned
above all with one thing: selling more of their perfume.

Perfumistas
see this:

and
hail the dawning of a new age, in which perfume is finally given the
recognition it deserves as one of the beaux arts.

In
contrast, the people at the corporate headquarters of the perfume
conglomerate giants making financial investment decisions—whether
or not to fund The Art of Scent exhibit and donate free perfume to
the Museum of Arts and Design—see, instead, this:

As they deliberate over whether to fund such an initiative, they may rub the palms of their hands together while dreaming gleefully about upcoming second-quarter returns. I do not
mean to suggest that there is anything wrong with any of this. Savvy
businessmen have always succeeded through such schemes. Indeed, the
very point of marketing—its raison
d'être—is
to persuade people to believe that they need what they do not need,
and to buy what they would not otherwise have bought. We have a wide
range of choices in deciding how to dispense with our wallet share
available for nonessential expenses, including luxuries such as
perfume. Marketers' job is to see to it they we spend our money on
their products, not those of the competition.

The
marketing masterminds who agreed to promote the event are well aware
that the fact that the perfumes on display in “The Art of Scent”
are not being sold in the museum's gift shop certainly will not
prevent enthusiastic exhibit goers from stopping at the nearest
Sephora or other retail perfume purveyor on their way home. As for
the countless people who have no way to travel to New York City to
see the exhibit, they can console themselves by purchasing bottles of
the “masterpieces” online.

The
reason why all of this should matter, to supporters of independent
perfume houses, is because consumers only allocate a portion of their
budget to perfume, and once that money has been spent, it will not be
spent again. Judging by some of the gushing I've seen around the
blogs, some perfumistas have come to believe that exalting
bestselling perfumes as artistic masterpieces will somehow help independent perfumers, when in fact nothing could be
farther from the truth.

In
reality, the more money people spend at the big houses funding the
exhibit and whose works are being heralded as masterpieces, the less
they will spend on the unnamed houses not being celebrated. The irony in
all of this is that the perfumistas who rush to lavish praise upon
Chandler Burr and his initiative seem to be entirely unaware of the
likely economic outcome of this scheme: to buoy and promote the
ongoing corporatization of perfumery. If Chandler Burr's funding, including his own salary, derives from the megacorporations controlling the houses whose works are currently on display at the Museum of Arts and Design, then he works for them. If his initiative succeeds in improving those companies' bottom line, then he will keep his job. If not, he will not.

The
Good News

Can
we talk about perfume? Yes, of course. Why? Because we do. Hundreds
of new perfume reviews are written online every day, and people are reading
them. The reviews combine personal anecdote and feelings with
references to terms recognizable to other perfume lovers because they
derive from what has emerged as a full-fledged perfume culture. The
discourse among members of fragrance communities is informed by an
idiom used by perfumers themselves. This makes perfect sense because
perfumers know more than anyone else what their own intentions are in
developing a new creation with particular aesthetic properties.

Certain
conventions have already been widely embraced. Because perfumistas
often commence from the text created by perfumers and marketers
themselves, they have become fond of talking about the objects of
their devotion in triangular hierarchies, as though there really were
a distinct and distinguishable top, middle, and base to perfumes.

In reality, the various stages in the evolution of a nonlinear perfume—from spritz to disappearance—are infinitely more nuanced and unfold continuously with no sharp breaks from one stage to the next. In some ways, perfume development bears similarities to music, which, too, flows through time in ways that static paintings, sculptures, and buildings do not.

The
complex evolution of a perfume over time can also be compared to the aging process of a person. Each person is born an
infant, grows and transforms continuously over the decades comprising
his or her life, until old age and finally death, at which point
there is little—if any—resemblance to the person's appearance at
birth. At any moment in time we can describe how the person looks:
her size, weight, and shape; the color of her hair and eyes; the
texture of her skin; the presence or absence of skin pigmentation,
etc. Just as in the case of perfume, we can decide to divide the life
into three parts: childhood, adulthood, and old age, but those are in
some ways arbitrary divisions, although they can be useful in certain circumstances.

Despite
its somewhat fictional quality and the grayness of its boundaries,
the tripartite hierarchy in perfume profiles may be nonetheless
helpful because in fact the opening stages in a perfume's development
are detectable but also transient, ceding quickly to the later
stages, the longest and most memorable part of which we refer to as
the drydown.

In
discussing what they perceive during their experience of a perfume,
reviewers sometimes lament not “getting” this or that note, but
in reality the notes are nearly never ingredients, as some of them are
explicitly claimed to be by the perfumers themselves in
self-consciously minimalist perfumes such as Escentric Molecules
Molecule 01
and Molecule 02
and Juliette Has A Gun Not
A Perfume.

Iso-E-super
is usually not mentioned as a note even though it is quite frequently
used as a cedar surrogate, just as ambroxan is used to mimic natural
ambergris, which is often listed as a note though it is in such cases
a fiction. All of this should suffice once and for all to demonstrate
that the ingredients are not the notes, and the alleged notes said to
be salient in a given creation by marketers are metaphors and
manifest evocations: an attempt to tell consumers what they are
supposed to find in the perfume.

Those
who know the difference between the scent of cedar and the scent of
the aromachemicals used to confer a cedar-like quality to a perfume,
may say that they do not detect cedar in a perfume which lists cedar
as a note. And they are right. Others may have arrived at a concept
of cedar which is more open and includes the scent of the
aromachemicals used to mimic the scent of cedar in nature, just as
the perfumer intended them to.

Once
we know what iso-E-super and ambroxan smell like, having compared
them directly to perfumes containing real cedar and ambergris
extracts, then we may become difficult to fool, jaded and even
annoyed by the near ubiquity of the use of such blatant aromachemical
surrogates under the guise of more natural substances. But
iso-E-super and ambroxan are only the beginning of the story, or the
first drops in a sea of metaphor. No perfume literally contains a cedar tree. Even those which contain substances derived directly from cedar wood are abstractions. Why are certain substances included in perfumes while others are not? Why do perfumers choose to produce a cedar scent, or one which smells like ambergris? For their effects on our sensory apparatus.

Ionones
are used to produce a violet-like scent; and eugenol smacks of clove
to many. But because different people have variable sensibilities and
sensitivities to all scents, the first-person experience of a perfume
may bear little—if any—resemblance to what the press materials
decree is the nature of the creation which they have launched and are
attempting to sell. Sometimes this is because they use unfamiliar
metaphors: oud and papyrus may have scents, but how many times have
most of us encountered them beyond the realm of perfume?

When we identify notes, we are sharing with others our own
subjective experience of a perfume. Likewise, when we laud a perfume as
beautiful or great, we may be saying something about its aesthetic
properties, but we are also saying something—indeed, much
more—about ourselves. The reason why we perfumistas have been
flocking together to discuss perfume is that we have established a
language through which to share our experiences with others who also
appreciate these same sorts of insights made possible by perfume.

By
penning reviews and commenting on them, explaining how our own
experience coheres or does not with that of another perceiver of the
same perfume, we broaden our understanding of not only perfume, but
also ourselves. We come to see what it means to perceive different
facets of a perfume and how two equally valid experiences may arrive
at divergent judgments about the value of the very same thing, as a
result of each individual's distinct history, memories, personality,
and tastes.

Perfume
language should be exactly what develops among perfume lovers
informed by perfumers and marketers because the only reason why we
have any understanding of perfume at all is because it is sustained
through the perception by some people of perfume as profitable. If no
one believed that they could make money from selling perfume, then
they would sell something else, and we would not be meeting to
discuss perfumes—the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly—because they would not exist at all.

At
the end of the day, what matters is our personal experience of
perfume. This implies, among other things, that if one loves
celebrity fragrances despised by niche snobs, one should
nonetheless wear them with one's head held high. How could anyone be
a better judge of what one likes than one's self? It does not matter whether other people disagree with our taste in perfume, although it would
be decent of us, whenever possible, to make an effort not to offend
others or induce in them undue strife, as a courtesy to our fellow
community members, by which we express our respect for and tolerance
of difference. Within the privacy of our home, anything goes: we
are the kings and queens of our scented castle!

What
are perfume reviews?

Perfume
is a cultural artifact, but it has no meaning unless it is
experienced, and for many people, the perfume story ends at pleasure. It is no coincidence that perfumes lauded as “great” are also
thought by many to be delightful to smell. But perfume perception can
also serve as a phenomenological tool, providing insight into our
place in the universe and how we in fact construct it, conceptually
speaking. Because of the intimate connections in our nervous system
between the processes of olfaction, cognition and emotion, perfume
immediately elicits memories of our past and may trigger in our mind
a cascade of emotions, images, and ideas.

There is no question that marketers attempt to shape those images through advertising, but any positive label or image attached or implied points the consumer in the very same direction: to reach for his or her credit card. Looking
beyond the perceiver, to the established art world in trying to make
sense of perfume, is to turn away from the profound philosophical
insights to which perfume may give rise. It is also to diminish or
deny the value of the uniquely intimate engagement which forms the
very basis of our love of perfume. We do not love a perfume because
someone else has labeled it in one way or another or hailed it as a
masterpiece. No, we love a perfume, when we do, for the pleasure it
provides and the richness it adds to our mental life, thanks to its
ability instantly to evoke ideas and images in our mind.

The
language in which we discuss perfume must connect directly with the
objects of our own experience as recorded in our memory bank because
that is both how and why perfume succeeds in affecting us. We compare
perfumes to other, noncomposed scents, because we have memories of
them, too. As perfumistas grow more and more familiar with the vast
terrain of the universe of perfume, they may begin to compare
perfumes to one another. However we choose to convey our experience,
it must commence from ideas in our own minds, whether rudimentary or
complex, and whatever their provenance. We are, in the end, products of our culture.

Some
perfume reviewers take themselves to be offering advice to their
readers about which perfumes are good and which are not. Others,
however, regard their task as a more modest one: to record the
subjective experience of their own encounter with a perfume. Such an
experience can never, strictly speaking, be replicated, even within
the very same perceiver who spritzes on the very same perfume. Why?
Because the perceiver will have changed, and the conditions in which
the perfume is being used will be different, too.

In
fact, the two different kinds of reviewers may inhere in the very
same person, someone who chronicles his or her subjective experience
in order to inform other people that there is someone somewhere who
has experienced the perfume thus. In other words,
the review expresses one possible reaction to the perfume, which may
or may not cohere with other people's experience. It is interesting,
all the same, because it reveals how other people may perceive what
we perceive in an entirely different way. Therein lies the profound
philosophical importance of perfume.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Perfume
is made to wear, just as food is made to eat. However, there is an
important distinction between the two: people must eat to survive.
Perfume, in contrast, is a luxury product with which the vast
majority of human beings past and present have very little
experience, if any at all. Most everyone can smell scent and
appreciate the olfactory beauty of a field of lavender or a grove of
orange trees, just as they can appreciate the sight of those things.
But the practice of perfuming oneself arises only in rather complex
cultural contexts.

Created
scents, or perfumes,
like the combinations of sound known as music,
are infinitely nuanced and not limited to the objects delineated by
us as numerically distinguishable denizens of reality. In nature
and in society, scents occur in groups and layers and can be
partitioned in various ways, but often they are not, although
particularly striking scents become instantly recognizable
intersubjectively and can serve as evidence of the presence of a
thing. The scent of a cigar lingers for hours in a hallway though the
person who puffed on it disappeared long before. The scent of smoke
really does signal the likely presence of fire, and natural gas is
made by its providers to waft of a rather acrid odor precisely so
that people will notice it before they succumb to its deadly effects.

Like
burning cigarettes and car exhaust, cough drops and cheese really do
have scents. Cherry cough drops smell different from honey lemon
cough drops, and some people will know that swiss cheese has a
different scent from that of cheddar. True epicureans may even be
able to distinguish Jarlsberg from Emmental by scent alone, and yet
they may agree that “cheese” in general has a scent which binds
various cheeses together more than any of them is bound to anything
else.

The
same thing happens with perfume, of course. Untutored perfume
enthusiasts may rave that a perfume smells “just like Chanel
no 5!”
even though it contains no aldehydes and in fact smells nothing like
it at all to someone with a wider range of experience with perfumes.
But sophisticates and dilettantes alike probably can all agree that
composed “perfumes” have a smell which makes any two of them
closer to each other than either is to the scent of cheese. I am
talking here not about facsimile scents such as produced by the house
of Demeter, but perfumes composed so as to stand out as distinct from
the smells occurring in nature or in human society. (The recently
launched perfume Eau
de Pizza Hut apparently
does not really smell like Pizza Hut, but that's another story.)

We
manage somehow to talk about perfumes by appealing to a combination
of mutually familiar scents in nature and makeshift fictions devised
largely for marketing purposes. In order to sell his perfume to a
client, who will then hopefully produce the creation for general
consumption, a perfumer must seduce the prospective buyer through the
use of provocative metaphors. It will not do to leave it at “this
is a beautiful perfume.”

The
perfumer needs to weave a story to convince the prospective producer
of the perfume that it meets the producer's own criteria for what
constitutes beauty. It is also necessary, of course, that the client
actually like the scent and believe that others will too, but the
perfumer may offer an appealing framework of metaphors through which
to understand the new creation and the sorts of images and feelings
it is intended to evoke.

The
perfumery business has developed in a certain direction in recent
decades, with fewer and fewer independent perfumers working in their
own atelier-businesses, and more and more contractual arrangements
being struck between self-appointed creative directors—often
themselves working under the aegis of a large corporation—and the
noses whom they enlist to realize their dream. When a perfumer is not
given complete creative license but issued a brief of conditions to
be satisfied, then it is the perfumer who must produce a scent which
somehow reflects the metaphorical dictates of the client.
Miuccia Prada,
for example, apparently dislikes dirty, skanky scents, which is why
all of the members of the Prada Infusion series, created for Prada by Daniela Andrier, smell clean and elegant.

Because
the language in which we discuss perfumes was essentially invented by
perfumers and their collaborative marketers, it is not really
feasible to think about perfume without its attendant scaffold of
concepts, including what have come to be termed “notes”. To talk
about notes is not to talk about ingredients. In a few cases,
perfumers have “shown their cards,” so to speak, by brazenly
disclosing that minimalist perfumes such as Escentric Molecules
Molecule
01
and Molecule
02
essentially comprise iso-E-super and ambroxan, respectively. In such
cases—Juliette Has A Gun Not
a Gun
is another minimalist ambroxan perfume—the notes are identified as
ingredients. But those are exceptions to the general rule.

Usually, in identifying notes, perfumers are not disclosing ingredients, although it is true that all-natural perfumers may be keen to fully list, to the best of their ability, all ingredients on the labels of their creations so that consumers can see which specific chemical substances are found inside the bottle. Marketing and labeling are distinct activities, of course, but in marketing an all-natural perfume, the list of ingredients itself becomes a selling point to those consumers who have decided to make a conscious and concerted effort to avoid poisoning themselves. Far more often than not, however, in both mainstream and niche perfumery, notes are in fact no more and no less than metaphors.

All
of this makes it seem rather curious to me that some people—most
vociferously and visibly, Chandler Burr, and I am not at all sure
whether anyone else agrees with him—should decry, in public
displays of apparently righteous indignation (he studied under Luca
Turin...), attempts to have meaningful discussions about perfume in
terms of notes as somehow insulting to perfumes and their creators.
I'm inclined to think
precisely the opposite: to claim, as Burr does, that the language of
visual arts is the best or most desirable language of discourse to
use in coming to terms with perfume would seem to imply that perfume
is somehow parasitic on the other arts, when in fact it is entirely
independent and sui
generis.

No
one would use the language of music theory to talk about architecture, and
to attempt to do so strikes me as a category mistake. Do buildings
have “keys” and “tempos” and “time signatures” and
“movements”? Those terms can be applied metaphorically, I
suppose—metaphors are infinitely applicable to anything—but to
have a meaningful discussion about architecture with
other people,
rather than simply talking to oneself, it seems best to use the
language which has developed along with the enterprise of
architecture itself, by the very people who know architecture best:
architects.

One
can, if one so desires, label Guerlain Jicky
as a work of Romanticism;
Givency L'Interdit
as Abstract
Expressionism;
Clinique Aromatics
Elixir
as a product of the “Early American” school; Guy Laroche Drakkar
Noir
as a work of Industrialism; Thierry Mugler Angel
as an example of Surrealism;
Issey Miyake L'eau
d'Issey
as Minimalism; Estée
Lauder Pleasures
as Photo Realism; Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue
as Kinetic Sculpture, Prada Amber
as Neo-romanticism, Hermès
Hermessence Osmanthe Yunnan
as a work of Luminism, and a perfume created by Daniela Andrier for Martin Margiela,
Untitled,
as an example of Post-brutalism. Why not?

Yes, indeed, one can apply language
to anything in any way one likes. However, if one is simply making up
the terms as one goes along, appropriating the well-developed
discourse of an entirely disparate enterprise in a vain effort to
come up with something new to say, then one will end up occupying a
rather solipsistic space. Why? Because the art critics who are
experts on the various schools of visual art have developed their
language and criteria of critique in a particular context to which
perfume simply does not belong, and they may or may not have any
personal interest in and knowledge of perfume.

At the same time, from the other
side, perfume enthusiasts—both perfumers and consumers—may in
many cases be altogether ignorant of such movements in visual art. To
expect them to become versed in the theory of another, rather erudite
discipline before they're able to say anything meaningful about their
direct experience of perfume seems dubious, to say the least.

The truth is that perfume lovers
have come to their knowledge of perfume through their personal
experience of perfume, to which the terms of visual art may or may
not bear any relevance. If people are to have meaningful discussions
about perfume with other people, they must together accept the terms
of the debate rather than simply submitting to the proclamation of a
single man that a completely foreign set of concepts and labels are
the best way to discuss perfume.

The
terms Romanticism,
Abstract
Expressionism,
Early
American School,
Industrialism,
Surrealism,
Minimalism,
Photo
Realism,
Kinetic
Sculpture,
Industrialism,
Neo-Romanticism,
Luminism,
and Post-Brutalism
are all a part of a discourse which applies to a particular range of
human activity. In order to succeed at hijacking this theoretical
apparatus and applying it to perfume, one would have to
simultaneously convince the art theorists and the perfumistas that
they are all completely wrong: in the former case, for “failing to
see” that, appearances notwithstanding, perfume is akin to the
visual arts; in the latter case, for “failing” to use the
prescribed language of visual art in talking about perfume.

I have noticed recently that many
bloggers seem to be supportive of Chandler Burr's efforts, having
apparently been hoodwinked into believing two manifest falsehoods.
First, perfumistas continue to labor under the misconception that to
deny that perfumery is an art is somehow to pay it a grave insult, when
in fact nothing could be farther from the truth. To claim that
perfume is a product of design is to appreciate the cultural context
in which it arises and to acknowledge that, if not for business
interests, we could have no knowledge of or access to perfume. To own
that perfume is a product of design is to affirm what most everyone
already does, that “Perfume must smell good,” just as as “Food
must be edible.”

The
constraints placed upon contracted perfumers are such that they are
tasked with producing creations which satisfy the values of other
people, not the creator him- or herself. If this enterprise can be
said to be art, then it is a deeply coopted form of art. Why not
simply acknowledge, then, that contracted perfumers are in the
business of design? Just as the people who write advertising copy for
companies are not, strictly speaking, literary writers, not all
perfumers are olfactory artists—in fact, most of them are not. But
perfumer
is not a dirty word or a term of derogation.

To return to the basic confusion
here, it simply does not follow from the fact that “Perfume is
good” that “Perfume is art.” The value of perfume is an
independent question from its status as a conceptual object. This is
what the art critics and sophisticated perfumistas who scoff at
Burr's ambitious and arguably befuddled initiative already know.
Those bloggers who deride the art critics as somehow benighted in
their failure to appreciate the artistic quality of perfume are in
fact the ones who would seem to be confused.

If
they actually knew what the terms Luminism,
Photo
Realism,
and Kinetic
Sculpture
meant, in the deep way in which people who have dedicated their lives
to learning about art have done, then they would recognize
immediately that Burr's appropriation of this discourse constitutes
no more and no less than a long series of category mistakes. Burr may
have successfully linked himself with the “pro-perfume” camp, but
one can be “pro-perfume” without being pro-Chandler Burr. The
fates of the two are not linked, as much as he may wish for them to
be.

My primary concern here is not with the economic implications of selecting a set
of best-selling perfumes to essentially market in a new way by
labeling them masterpieces.
Suffice it here to make a simple economic observation: that every
bottle of Light
Blue or Pleasures
purchased by a consumer in response to having learned that those perfumes have been exalted as masterpieces by someone who seems to be situated
so as to competently make such claims, is one less bottle purchased from an independent house. Consumers have finite wallet
shares.

The
second falsehood seemingly embraced—whether wittingly or not—by
anyone who supports Burr's initiative is that, up until now, both
perfumistas and perfumers have somehow been confused in making use of
the language devised by perfumers themselves in order to communicate
with one another and their clients about perfume. In fact, Burr himself erroneously conflates ingredients and notes, as is illustrated by this excerpt from a New York Times piece (in which Burr is quoted) on "The Art of Scent" exhibit:

"I am completely opposed to this idiotic reductionism of works of olfactory art to their raw materials, which is as stupid as reducing a Frank Gehry building to the kind of metal, the kind of wood and the kind of glass that he used."

Burr
may know a lot about the business of perfume (which, to be honest,
makes me wonder how he of all people could believe that
client-contracted perfumery is art), but simply to repeat over and
over again that a perfume such as Diptyque Eau
de Lierre
is “an extraordinary work of photorealism,” and that perfume is
art because it is a product of artifice, is not enough. Dryer sheets
are a product of artifice. Are they then works of art, too?

Unfortunately for Burr, his
greatest virtue, the ability to persuade people to believe in him
enough to invest in him, is also his worst vice. It was Burr himself
who proposed the very idea of the Department of Olfactory Art at the
Museum of Arts and Design, with none other than himself as its
curator! If the package is pretty, that's all well and fine, but if this
ambitious initiative is to survive, there must also be
something inside. It's hard to imagine that many art critics are
going to embrace with starry eyes Burr's makeshift apparatus and his
slapping onto perfumes decreed by him to be masterpieces (and
produced by his funders) of labels seemingly pulled out of a hat.

In order to succeed in this venture
(and it is, let us be frank, a business venture), Burr's having
persuaded perfume companies to donate to his cause will not alone
suffice. He must also somehow wipe the theoretical slate clean of
both the history of art and the history of perfume, and that, far
more difficult task, would seem to be altogether beyond his means.

Monday, December 17, 2012

My fragrant friends, I come to you today with an urgent matter requiring your immediate attention if we are to avert impending doom: the complete take-over of perfumery by the Oud Machine (hereafter, OM).

You may find my warning alarmist, and I own that it is—as it must be, given the gravity of the crisis before us. Before I offer you the tools to extricate yourself from the insidious OM, let us review the facts. According to the Parfumo.net database:

In 2006, no perfume was launched
with the word oudin its name.

In 2007, three perfumes were
launched with the word oud in their name.

In 2008, thirteen perfumes were
launched with the word oud in their name, but all came from the
houses of Montale, Mancera (more on the “M” connection,
below...), or Ajmal.

In 2009, twelve perfumes with the
word oudin their name were launched, distributed over eight
different houses.

In 2011, all hell broke loose,
with twenty-two oud-named perfumes launched by sixteen different
houses

In 2012, the numbers leapt to
thirty-four oud-named perfumes launched by thirty different houses

I think that you can see where all of this is leading:

“Scores of sheep flock together and head in the same direction after being told by a sales associate in a niche emporium that cool people wear oud perfumes.”

Three oud-perfume producing houses
became eight, became ten, became sixteen, producing where there were
none only five years earlier: thirty new oudperfumes!

Let's look at some of the mathematical
series involved, selecting a few choice data points:

3——>8——>16——>34

The change in the numbers:

5——>8——>18

The next number in the series, those
readers proficient at standardized tests will aver, is:

34

From there we can continue the series:

5——>8——>18——>34——>70——>138——>278——>564!!!!!!!

As you can see, within five years, the
world will be literally awash in oud perfume. By the
end of a decade, there will be an oud perfume purveyor on every corner,
all asking for our precious wallet share, and what choice will we
really have by then????

Yes, I'm afraid that the complete and
utter homogenization of niche perfumery looms before us. The turning
point may have been the admission of Estée
Lauder and Jo Malone into the oud club. So now middle-class suburban
housewives are wearing oud as well? Adding oud perfumes to their
shopping carts along with their BB creams so that they can qualify
for the latest GWP (gift with purchase) worth all of $1? What
is this world coming to? I ask most
sincerely.

I suppose that I should share with
those of you who do not know that “BB creams” or Beauty Balms,
too, were a capitalist-generated need now clamored for by all
image-conscious women of the world. But let us return to the far more
pressing matter at hand: the question of oud and the spectre of OM.

The Story of OM

Perfume tastes cycle, just like tastes
in everything else fashion related. How else to explain the
oft-wielded locution by younger perfumistas, Old Lady Perfume, used
to denounce perfumes which the whippersnappers deem fit to be worn
only by octogenarians rotting away in retirement homes? Proud wearers
of so-called Old Lady Perfumes may smugly reply: “ignorance.” But
do you really know anything whatsoever about what you do not know,
aptly termed by former U.S. defense secretary and epistemologist
Donald Rumsfeld, the “unknown unknowns”?

Our concern here is not with the
question of Chanel no 5, whether it is as cool as Brad Pitt or
as outmoded as Zsa Zsa Gabor. No, we have much stinkier odors to
mask. Yes, the latest craze in perfume, which has yet to run its
course and is gaining strength with each passing day, is in fact the
basis of some of the stinkiest perfumes ever concocted on the face of
the earth, to wit: oud.

In truth, we are being shepherded quite
contradictorily from two sides simultaneously. At the mainstream
designer level, we are being told to scent ourselves as though we
were dryer sheets, shampoo and conditioner, or even household
cleaning products, as the influence of industrial giants such as
Procter & Gamble continues to swell unabated.

Yes, the perfumers creating scents for
Oil of Olay face products are indeed the same perfumers creating
scents for Pantene shampoo, and they also design pseudo-niche series
of perfumes for the once independent houses now comprising but a thin
page in the P&G portfolio. Will they survive? Does it even matter anymore?

If we stray from the designer herd,
attempting to identify creativity and novelty in the niche arena, we
find ourselves corralled more and more narrowly into yet another,
perhaps even more insidious olfactory ghetto: the land of oud
perfumes.

This clever plot has obviously been
designed to secure our conformity with what we are told is desirable
in perfume. But have we ever spent any time asking ourselves, in our
heart of hearts, whether this is really true? Why in the world should
we want to smell and waft of oud, pray tell?

I recently experienced something of an
epiphany in this regard, which I am anxious to share with you O
Not-so-gently Scented Reader. You may have reservations, having come
to the conclusion—and not unjustifiably so—that “one person's
epiphany is another person's hallucination.” And I do not deny that
this is true. Fortunately, however, true epiphanies wear their
veridicality on their face, and I was blessed to have been the
recipient of one only just recently, which happens, not
coincidentally, to bear on the topic at hand.

I was testing the latest oud creation
to have found its way into my queue, Rosamunda, from the house
of Laboratorio Olfattivo. It smelled good, and it smelled
comfortingly familiar. Sure enough, it was that tried-and-true triad
of rose, saffron, and oud rolled together once again and poured into
a bottle to entice those of us by now accustomed—and drawn like
iron filings to a magnet—to the scent.

My first reaction was: “Hmm....
smells like Bond no 9 New York Oud.” In my admittedly
obsessive-compulsive quest for truth in reviewing, I decided to do a
side-by-side test of the two perfumes. What did I find? I discovered
that I preferred the Bond no 9. Why? Because it wafted much less of
oud and much more of rose. Suddenly the truth flashed before my eyes
like a javelin hurled down from the heavens by an angry God with no
stock holdings in niche oud ventures:

Do I even like oud?

I was shocked, at first, by
the question. I had spent many a review taking a house to task for
producing what appeared to be an oudless oud perfume, but here I was
at last confronted with the fact that in a comparison of two
oud-boasting perfumes, I preferred the one with less, not more of the
allegedly precious substance, which I had been incessantly
indoctrinated by the OM to believe that I desire!

What, then, was the basis of
my complaint in earlier reviews of oud-challenged oud perfumes, my
fragrant friends? That the perfume in question, allegedly issued for
we oud aficionados, was too oud weak to meet our oud need.

What oud need might that be?
Why it's none other than the very one which was created by the launch
of so many oud perfumes over the course of the past six years! First
there were no oud perfumes. Today there are dozens, and they
continue to proliferate as so many of us have been tricked by the
OM—the most effective promulgator
of propaganda since Goebbels himself—into believing that we not
only want but in fact need oud.

We will travel to the ends
of the cyber-world and pay exorbitant sums (relative to the price of
other perfumes) to be able to sniff yet another new oud perfume, and to be thereby granted the privilege of bitching when the
perfume inside an oud-labeled bottle contains nothing of the kind. Or
so we think.

But do we really know this,
in the first place? Many of the honest perfumistas among us must own
that we have never been to Oman and do not expect to travel there
anytime soon. Our concept of “oud” derives solely from what we
have been presented as “oud” in perfume. This means that if rose,
oud, and saffron are often rolled together in the same composition,
we may find difficulty discerning the oud as an isolable note from
the complex in which it is conveyed to our nose. And if we think that
we don't, we may be deluding ourselves.

The devoted-to-oud reader
may snort in response to my concern, to which I can only reply: the
problem is much more profound than it may on its surface seem.
Perhaps the art-mongers will own that perfume is subject to the whims
of fashion no more and no less than anything else proposed to consumers by design
houses. Perhaps they will not worry that they have been molded into
oud-ingesters, always wanting more and more oud, never satiated, just
as Marx and others so incisively diagnosed.

The truth, my fragrant friends, is that the proverbial wool of your very own coat has been pulled over your eyes, blinding you to the reality of what has been transpiring in niche perfumery over these past few years.

Is it too late to stop the
OM? Has my little manifesto been for naught? I think not, my comrades-in-noses, but we must take action now, and we must do so swiftly,
prepared to beat off those who would draw us back into the oud-herd
once again.

For those stalwarth souls
who are now ready to take back the oud-saturated night. I offer the
following four-step program for recovery.

Saying “No” to the
OM

It is
high time for us to get our wits about us and nip this oud monster in
the bud. Just say “No” to OM. The challenge before us may seem
daunting, but a few guidelines may help you to win back your
perfuming autonomy. If you are a perfumer, at last ready to break
from the pseudo-niche herd, I encourage you, too, not only to cease and desist
from producing oud perfumes but also to refrain from succumbing to what will no
doubt remain the temptation to wear some of the oud stockpiled in the
back room of your atelier. Please be forewarned that we willstop the OM, and when we do, you will want to be on the right side of history.

Don't
fall for the price trap—all that glitters of oud is not gold.Oud perfumes often cost more than the non-oud perfumes of the very
same house. The first step, then, must be to refuse to pay the price
being asked for über
niche perfumes. Let niche be good enough for you. Don't be fooled by
this little game, the suggestion that you get what you pay for. In
the case of oud, my fragrant friends, you pay only to be enslaved by
the OM.

Temptation
must be thwarted. When you espy a new
oud offering, beckoning you from the counter of one of your
customary niche emporium haunts, take a deep breath, count to eight,
and walk slowly toward the door. Do not run, because you do not want
to draw the attention of an SA, who may, and likely will, run after
you to spritz you with a bit of the evil elixir, hoping that this
will precipitate your return to the herd, that a few drops will
cause you to throw open the oud floodgates, and your wallet, once
again.

Repeat
after me: Rien n'est gratuit...
[Nothing is free.]
You will no doubt for the foreseeable future continue to receive
“free” samples of oud perfumes from “generous” emporia and
houses with new launches. Don't be fooled. Upon receiving one of
these vials, proceed with dispatch and purpose to your kitchen sink,
remove the lid from the vial, and pour the contents down the drain.
This will be difficult at first, I am aware, but with time, and as
your own sense of your perfumic autonomy slowly begins to return,
you will become stronger and more determined with each vial emptied
in a haughty show of disdain for the OM.

Knowledge
is power. Be ever vigilant of the
forces at work behind the scenes of the OM. Everyone knows deep down
inside that behind every Machine hides The Man, the puppetmaster pulling the strings. Is it a coincidence
that in this case his name also happens to begin with the letter
'M'? I think not. The veritable flood of oud perfumes over the last
few years has been yet another ingenious scheme on the part of The
Man to convince perfume enthusiasts that they desire nothing more
than Middle Eastern inspired oud perfume.

But once the oud seed has
been planted—like a tick, or a microchip—it won't be long before the sheep all flock back to
Montale/Mancera. Why? Because all oud roads lead ultimately to
Montale, one way or the anagrammatically other. The Man's man on the
ground, Ammar Atmeh is there to authenticate the perfumes being
produced by the OM (not coincidentally located in OMan)
as the real thing. That's right genuine oud perfumes, and in
sufficiently high concentration so as to be detectable by even the
marginally hyposmic nose, can be dependably found at one and only
one house, and it does indeed begin with the letter 'M'.

So
there you have it, my fragrant friends, the peculiar phenomenon of
oudless oud perfumes, too, has as at its source The Man. As difficult
to believe as it may be (not at all to the savvy shoppers among my
readers, those who have studied up close the wily ways of
capitalists, and devised ways to beat them at their own game),
Monsieur M. has been sending oud-siphoning elves out to dilute the
stores of oud juice at his competitors' houses the night before
aliquots are to be measured and mixed into the final perfumes.

The
results we have all seen—or rather sniffed—and we have indeed
become, as was the intention of this ploy, ever more cynical, wary of
the sheer possibility of finding a decent oud perfume produced by any
house other than Montale/Mancera. I rest my case.

To
those perfumers whose interest may have been piqued by my posting of
pictures of their oud creations, I offer commiseration. Yes, I am
afraid that you have become the feckless minions of The Man. Until
today, you, too, were being tricked into complicity with the OM. Yes,
lurking in the shadows of every machine, even those of which we have
become unwitting cogs, stands The Man, whose covert actions keep it chugging along as
though in perpetual motion, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

My
dear, honorable perfumers, it is time for you to throw your own wrench
into the OM's works. Just say “No” to future oud-perfume
launches! Working together, as a team, we perfumistas and you, the
perfumers not profitably affiliated with the OM, can take back the
oud night, allowing creativity and autonomy to reign in the glorious
universe of perfume once again.